The Secretary of State was asked—

David Taylor: The hazardous life of some forms of plutonium exceeds a quarter of a million years, so thousands of generations of people in Ayrshire, Fife and Caithness may have to live with the presence of a toxic nuclear dump on their doorstep. Do these intolerable risks not show that the Trident programme should be abandoned, not salami-sliced, and the £100 billion saved invested in more socially useful projects in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom?

Michael Connarty: When my right hon. Friend speaks to his ministerial colleagues, will he ask them whether they will apply to the European Union globalisation fund, which is now being provided just to respond to the current economic downturn? For example, Ireland has just had £36 million, and it is about to move 500 jobs at Bausch and Lomb from West Lothian to Waterford in Ireland. Surely when we are losing jobs, we can also apply to that fund for money for Scotland to support employment there in the face of the economic recession.

The Prime Minister was asked—

David Cameron: Well, I will not only give it to the Prime Minister, but my hon. Friend- [ Interruption. ] What is extraordinary is that my hon. Friend the shadow schools Secretary wrote to the Prime Minister's right hon. Friend the schools Secretary a week ago about the issue. Let me draw the Prime Minister's attention to the fact that two schools have been established by an extremist Islamist foundation, the ISF or Islamic Shaksiyah Foundation, which is a front organisation for Hizb ut-Tahrir. The ISF has secured a total of £113,000 of Government money, some of which was from the pathfinder scheme, whose objective is meant to be preventing violent extremism. Can the Prime Minister explain how that completely unacceptable situation came about?

Gordon Brown: I am happy to say that this will be looked into in every detail. I am told that the two schools that the right hon. Gentleman referred to have been inspected. I will look at the results of those inspections and write to him. We are dealing with grants of £113,000 of public money, as he said, and two schools that I do not know the names of, and I shall look at this matter very carefully.

Eric Martlew: I thank the Prime Minister for his words of comfort and encouragement to the people of Cumbria today, following last week's devastating floods. In 2005 my constituency was flooded, and the Government were very generous in providing resources for flood defences. It will cost £40 million just to rebuild the bridges in west Cumbria, and probably the same amount to rebuild the roads. Will the Prime Minister assure us that he and the Government will be able to help? The people of Cumbria cannot afford to pay that bill.

Gordon Brown: My hon. Friend is absolutely right-100 flood protection schemes have recently been brought in. One of them is for Carlisle, where £40 million is being spent to make sure there is proper protection against the floods that did so much damage the last time, and I understand that in the recent times about 3,000 properties were prevented from being flooded as a result of those new flood defence arrangements. We will look at what we have done. I have said already that the Environment Agency budget and the other budgets for dealing with flood defences will rise to £800 million in 2010-11. That is a sign of our commitment to making sure the whole country is best protected against flooding.

Alistair Darling: Mr Speaker, with permission, I should like to make a short statement on the emergency liquidity assistance provided by the Bank of England to the banking system.
	One of the functions of central banks is to provide emergency liquidity to banks when it is necessary to do so. Lender of last resort facilities have been a feature of the banking system for many years, because there will be times when an individual bank or, as we saw last year, several banks find it difficult or impossible to raise the funds they need from the market. It is therefore essential that the Bank of England has the power to lend to individual banks facing such temporary liquidity problems. It is important, too, that the Bank of England can do so effectively. Inevitably, on occasion, that means that the Bank has to be able to do so without disclosing its operations.
	Disclosure of individual operations could lead to a loss of confidence and exacerbate any short-term liquidity problems. That was exactly the problem we saw with Northern Rock in September 2007. It was a problem recognised by the House, and by the Treasury Committee in its report on Northern Rock-it recognised that some operations needed to be kept confidential.
	Early in 2008, we consulted on proposals to facilitate limited disclosure of the provision of emergency liquidity to ensure that such assistance could be made effective. Following that, the Banking Act 2009 provided an end to automatic disclosure of liquidity assistance by the Bank of England. This enabled the Bank to decide the most appropriate way in which to make disclosures to the market. The Financial Services Authority, too, has said there may be good reasons for delaying disclosure of emergency liquidity operations.
	Twelve months ago, we faced a situation in which the world banking system was on the brink of collapse. No one should underestimate the gravity of the situation that we then faced. Protecting retail depositors and maintaining financial stability was essential. That was why I said in my statement to the House on 6 October 2008 that the Governor had made it clear that
	"in these extraordinary market conditions, the Bank of England will take all actions necessary to ensure the banking system has access to sufficient liquidity".-[ Official Report, 6 October 2008; Vol. 480, c. 21.]
	That was what we did. The Governor's decision to make emergency liquidity available was quite right and we supported it.
	Yesterday, the Governor of the Bank of England told the Treasury Committee that the Bank had extended such emergency liquidity assistance to the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS in the autumn of 2008. He told the Committee that in most cases confidence can be best sustained if the Bank's support is disclosed only when the conditions have improved to a point where the disclosure itself should not be a cause for disturbance. However, he said that, as stated in his report, it is the policy of the Bank that such assistance should be disclosed once the Bank considers that the need for confidentiality has ceased.
	The Governor's judgment is that now that RBS has signed up for the asset protection scheme and Lloyds Banking Group has embarked on its alternative strategy for capital raising, there is no longer a need for the assistance to remain secret and it is now appropriate to disclose details. I agree with his judgment.
	As the Governor said, from 1 October 2008 the Bank provided liquidity to HBOS, and from 7 October to RBS. Use of the facilities peaked at £36.6 billion for RBS on 17 October and £25.4 billion for HBOS on 13 November. The total use of emergency liquidity assistance across both banks peaked at £61.6 billion on 17 October. At that point, the two banks concerned provided the Bank with collateral-including residential mortgages, Government debt and personal and commercial loans-totalling in excess of £100 billion. The banks were charged fees for the use of the facilities. The RBS facility was repaid in full by 16 December 2008, and the HBOS facility by 16 January 2009. There has been no cost to the taxpayer.
	By that time, the Government's recapitalisation of the banking system was in place. That, alongside other action such as the credit guarantee scheme, stabilised the banking system. Because of the scale of these liquidity operations by the Bank of England compared with the size of its balance sheet, I granted an indemnity in October 2008 to cover potential losses in respect of further lending. The indemnity was provided for actions taken by the Bank of England from 14 October 2008 for a period of two months. In return, the Bank of England paid the Treasury a commercial fee totalling £18.9 million.
	In my view, it is essential that the Bank has the discretion to provide emergency liquidity assistance when it judges it necessary to do so. Over the past year, we have had to provide extraordinary support in what are extraordinary times. I have kept the House informed with numerous statements and made it clear that we would do whatever it took to stabilise the banking system. As a result, no savers in UK banks or building societies have lost money.
	Inevitably, some of the support had to be provided on a confidential basis-something that most people recognise. The judgment on when it is the right time to disclose such operations is a fine one, but I support the Governor's decision to disclose the information yesterday. I commend the statement to the House.

George Osborne: Let me start by making it absolutely clear that we support the actions taken by the Bank of England to maintain financial stability. I completely agree with the Chancellor that, as a general principle, the central bank must be able to carry out its lender of last resort function with the discretion that it deems necessary to preserve the financial system. Its ability to do so will remain under the reform structure of financial regulation that we intend to implement.
	As the deputy governor, Paul Tucker, said yesterday in his evidence to the Select Committee, these loans were a classic lender of last resort operation. So, we support the principle of covert lending operations by the Bank, but of course we also have a responsibility to ask questions on behalf of the taxpayer once the details of such operations are quite rightly made public. I shall therefore first ask the Chancellor specifically about his role. He said that he authorised the indemnity, but will he confirm whether his authorisation was sought for the loans made by the Bank of England, and indeed its operation?
	The Chancellor made this statement because the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) and I put in to ask an urgent question. Surely the Chancellor himself should be the person who initially informs Parliament of operations on this scale, particularly when there are very large taxpayer indemnities that he signs off. It has, of course, taken more than a year for the existence of these loans to be disclosed. What discussions did the Chancellor have with the Governor over the last 12 months about whether the disclosure could have been made earlier? In particular, once the Government had declared their intention to insure the assets of both banks in January this year, what did the right hon. Gentleman consider to be the remaining risks that would have resulted from the disclosure of the loans at that time?
	My second question is partly to do with the issue of timing. Is the Chancellor personally satisfied that the Lloyds shareholders were given the maximum possible amount of information about the financial health of HBOS in advance of the merger of the two banks? Was the loan to HBOS fully repaid by the time of the merger in mid-January? What legal advice did he receive about the level of disclosure required, and is he expecting any legal challenges from shareholders?
	Thirdly, as the Chancellor implied in his statement, the Banking Act 2009 removed the requirement for the Bank of England to publish a weekly balance sheet. Was the existence of the loans a motivating factor behind that change, which was of course proposed at the time that the loans were in existence? Is it desirable that the Bank essentially has no requirement to publish regular information about its balance sheet? Does he agree that that at least needs to be kept under review?
	The sheer scale of the loans-they are more than the entire schools budget-raises the question of how the two banks were allowed to pursue funding models that left them so close to collapse in the first place. Does not that illustrate yet again the total failure of the tripartite system of regulation created by this Government? Does it not underline the need for fundamental reform to put the Bank of England back in charge of banking supervision? That argument is now explicitly supported by Jacques de Larosière, the architect of the European changes, and it is driving reforms in Germany, Belgium and America. Indeed, President Obama's economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said this month that separating bank supervision from central banking can cause one to
	"get into a 'left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing' kind of problem in a crisis".
	When asked to cite an example, he singled out the UK, saying that the divided regulatory system had caused "a lot of problems", yet the Government's proposed Financial Services Bill, which we will debate in a couple of days' time, does absolutely nothing to address that flaw at the heart of the regulatory system. We all know why-it was designed by the Prime Minister of this country.
	Finally, I should like to ask the Chancellor about something else that the Governor of the Bank of England said to the Treasury Committee yesterday in his comments on Britain's credit rating. When asked whether Britain was at risk of a downgrade, the Governor of our central bank said:
	"The longer there isn't a credible plan that sets out what action will be taken on the debt, the more"
	there is a risk to that credit rating. Does the Chancellor agree that the only possible interpretation of those remarks is that the Governor does not think that there is currently a "credible plan" to deal with our budget deficit? Why is the Chancellor taking these risks with Britain's credit rating?

Peter Bone: In the Chancellor's statement, he says that £100 billion was taken in collateral by the Bank in support of these massive loans. Will he publish the document supporting that collateral and put a copy in the Library?

Jim Murphy: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his interest in this and his commitment to the package that we unveiled today. As Sir Ken Calman has said, this is a package of 63 recommendations which hang together. We intend to take forward 39 of the 42 that apply to the Government. On the question of the Forth road bridge, there is a deal on the table. The Scottish Government have unprecedented flexibility, not matched in any other Department in Whitehall or other part of the UK Government, and £1 billion that would help to make the Forth road bridge a reality. Unfortunately, for reasons of ideology, they are turning their back on that unprecedented deal. They have the constitutional right to be wrong, but it is not too late for them to change their minds.

Chris Grayling: I beg to move an amendment, at the end of the Question to add:
	"but humbly regret that the Gracious Speech fails to offer answers to the growing social challenges facing the United Kingdom, and proposes no new ideas about ending the culture of deprivation and welfare dependency in many parts of the country or on dealing with the growing level of economic inactivity; note that it offers no fresh solutions to the challenge of anti-social behaviour in communities around the country, nor does it reform the licensing system to tackle alcohol-fuelled disorder; and further regret that after 12 years in power the Government brings forward no new approaches to the challenges the country faces."
	Twelve years is a long time to be in government. It gives any Government as long as they should sensibly need to demonstrate that they can make a difference. By next May, when they will be returning to the country for the fourth time to ask for a mandate, the Government will have been in power for 13 years, so the question for every voter is do they really deserve one? This afternoon I want to look at the things that the Government promised all those years ago-things that they have continued to promise, year after year, in virtually every Queen's Speech, including this one-and to ask a simple question: have they delivered the things that they promised?
	Back in 1994, a new, young Labour leader set out his stall to the party conference, telling his delegates, in some of his most memorable phrases, what needed to be done:
	"We can all get angry because crime hurts,"
	he told us,
	"and it hurts most the people who are least able to fight back. But it is not enough to get angry, to stamp your feet, and shout from the Tory conference platform. That is the soft option. We need a new approach. One that is tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime."
	In the intervening years, the Labour Government have had more than a fair chance to deal with the challenges that he talked about. They have had the money, with £350 billion spent on worklessness, at least £70 billion spent on policing and other crime fighting and more than £20 billion spent on early-years and child care services since 1997. They have also had the time, over these 12 long years, so now it seems entirely fair to look at what has happened in Britain and assess the degree to which our social challenges have begun to reduce.
	Let us use that speech back in 1994 by the man who became Prime Minister as a benchmark against which to judge the success or failure of this Government. "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" became the bywords for this Government's approach to law and order. In that speech, the then Leader of the Opposition and subsequently Prime Minister set out a range of detailed programmes that he said were essential to fighting crime. So how did they do?
	Let us start, as Tony Blair did on that September day, with the bit in his speech about being tough on crime. First on the list were measures to tackle juvenile offending. They have been a feature of virtually every one of the 49 criminal justice Bills that we have had since then. We have had initiative after initiative and new idea after new idea. Surely that must have made a difference. The number of persistent young offenders sentenced by courts in England and Wales have increased by 92 per cent. since 1997. In 2007-08, more than 93,000 youngsters aged 10 to 17 entered the criminal justice system for the first time, up from only 78,000 five years previously, in 2002-03. Just a couple of weeks ago, Home Office research showed that 72 per cent. of 10 to 25-year-olds admitted to committing crime or antisocial behaviour within a four-year period.
	The next bit in the speech was the plan to crack down on illegal firearms. Over the past decade, there has been a big jump in gun crime. The number of firearms offences, excluding air weapons, has increased from 5,209 a decade ago to a provisional figure of 8,184 in 2008-09, an increase of 57 per cent. The number of people injured or killed by a gun has more than doubled, increasing from 864 a decade ago to 1,760 in 2008-09. Behind those figures have been a series of high-profile tragedies, punishment shootings and a culture of weapons on our streets not seen previously.
	Tony Blair then talked about the need to punish properly crimes of violence, including racial violence. Violent crime has increased from 615,000 offences in 1998-99 to just over 1 million in 2008-09, an increase of 68 per cent. In 1998, 23,500 people were cautioned for violence against the person. In 2007, that figure had doubled, to 52,300.

David Burrowes: My hon. Friend is making a crucial point about the lack of information for victims. Although several years ago the Government promised £11 million to the Crown Prosecution Service to track all cases online, is he concerned that we have still not reached that point and that we are to have yet another White Paper in which the same promises will be made but not delivered?

Alan Johnson: The hon. Gentleman should not denigrate what is happening in Manchester and London and compare it in this way, exaggerate it and use that kind of hyperbole. Of course we have some issues in this country. Incidentally, the hon. Gentleman mentioned the murder rate, and the point made by the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) about the British crime survey was right, because someone cannot be surveyed if they are dead. The murder rate is 1.4 per 100,000. That puts us 46th in the world, below Finland, Portugal and Iceland. It is the lowest rate we have had for many years.
	I believe that this broken Britain mantra is actually designed to help us, however, because it reminds the British public what life was like in the '80s and '90s- [Interruption.] Well, the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell began his speech by saying that we had been in power for 12 years-soon to be 13 years-and that that was the time to see what a Government had done. There was spiralling crime in the '80s and '90s, and more than 3 million unemployed. There were 24-hour trolley waits in accident and emergency, people waiting years for a simple cataract operation, single parents stigmatised, the gay and lesbian community offended by section 28, mortgage repossessions, poverty pay-when we introduced the minimum wage, we found that a quarter of a million people were on £1.50 an hour-and appalling educational issues. I ask any Conservative Member to tell me what was the level of attainment of five good GCSEs-at A* to C-in inner London, where we are now, in 1997, after 18 years of Tory rule? Does anyone wish to contribute a figure?

Alan Johnson: I believe that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell is trying to help us achieve that.
	There were 2.9 million pensioners in abject poverty-that is £69 a week with income support-and in the previous 18 years they had one real-terms increase in pensions, and that was the year the Conservatives put VAT on fuel.

Lynne Jones: My right hon. Friend talks about the Government's good record on getting people into work. The right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) recently provoked headlines such as "Benefits Britain" and "Shameless Labour" when she claimed that the number of households receiving more than £15,000 in benefits had doubled. That might be true, but when one examines the statistics on households with a member working, one finds that the numbers have not increased at all. The reason for the doubling is because the Labour Government have been far more generous to pensioners and it is they, particularly those who are in greater need, who have benefited from the increase in benefits, not those of working age.

Alan Johnson: All the measures we are taking in difficult economic circumstances will be important, be they on child tax credit, working tax credit or continuing to increase the national minimum wage. I should point out that on a quiet Friday, eight Conservative Members-to be fair, they were not Front Benchers-tried to move a resolution to freeze the national minimum wage. The measures that we will introduce on housing benefit will also make an enormous contribution.
	The Gracious Speech confirmed that we will introduce the Child Poverty Bill in the current Session. It has already been widely debated in this Chamber and there is support from both sides of this House for further action to reduce substantially relative, absolute and persistent child poverty, as well as material deprivation. The Bill will legally bind the Government to taking the sustained action necessary to meet the 2020 target, whether that is by increasing parental employment and skills, providing financial support or improving health, housing, education and social services. It also commits us to report annually to Parliament on progress on the 2020 target. The Bill will create a child poverty commission to advise the Government on policy development and will place a clear duty on local authorities both to reduce poverty locally and mitigate its effects.
	Under the provisions of our Bill, our focus on supporting the poorest families in the country will not merely continue-it will intensify. We are already creating up to 95,000 new jobs from the £1 billion future jobs fund; the first jobs became available in October and there will be thousands more in the coming months. Additionally, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced last week further steps to tackle youth unemployment in order to avoid at all costs what happened in the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of young people were left to drift into long-term unemployment.
	Let me now turn to the Crime and Security Bill, which comes at a time when there are more police officers than ever before, with substantial support from police community support officers, which did not previously exist, and with more money than ever available to spend on tackling crime. This country's police and support staff have presided over the first sustained reduction in crime in almost 100 years, with violent crime having decreased by 41 per cent. since 1997 and public confidence increasing. However, there remain communities across the country in which the fear of crime is endemic and antisocial behaviour is far too prevalent. We should not portray this issue as if it is some kind of battle between the generations, not least because 60 per cent. of antisocial behaviour orders are handed to adults and because, as we saw with the tragic case of Fiona Pilkington, teenagers are as likely to be the victims as the perpetrators. The vast majority of young people are law-abiding and hard working, and make a positive contribution to their communities. However, some of them drift into antisocial behaviour and gang-related crime.

David Burrowes: The Home Secretary has spoken about domestic violence, gang crime and antisocial behaviour, but there has been no reference to drugs and alcohol. The right hon. Gentleman has taken off his glasses, but will he take off his rose-tinted glasses and recognise that we top the European league for the problematic use of drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines by young people? A total of £1.5 billion has been paid into the pot for drug treatment, enforcement and prevention, but what are the results?

Shailesh Vara: The hon. Lady says, "Of course," but I suggest that she does some homework before she makes such comments because the facts are anything but what she says.
	What of those thugs who are caught? For them, antisocial behaviour orders are more a badge of honour than a measure of crime prevention. The 2001 Labour manifesto included a pledge that "persistent offending" should lead to "more severe punishment", but that has turned out to be such a mockery that it is scarcely worth spending time on it, although I will dwell on it just a little. Penalty notices for disorder are dished out by police forces like confetti. Some individuals are given penalty notices even before they have paid for the previous one. Following a freedom of information request that I made to every police force in the country, I found that one individual had received eight notices in one year alone. Surely someone should have come to the conclusion at some point that the method of preventing crime by simply issuing another notice was not working.
	Labour's 1997 election pledge was to ensure that prison regimes would be constructive and that inmates faced up to their offending behaviour. There have been many subsequent promises to provide education and training, and treatment for drug addiction, but they have simply not been followed through. In fact, prison is now one of the best places in which to pick up a drug habit.
	Let us consider what actually happens to prisoners when they go to prison. A new prisoner waits a few weeks to get on a training course. When he or she finally gets on that course, they are likely to be moved to another prison halfway through that course-without finishing it. Then, at the new prison, they start the whole process again, and wait a few weeks to get on a course and so on, so the cycle continues and the training is never completed. No wonder prisoners leave prison still unable to read or write, or to have a useful trade that could help them contribute to society, rather than being dependent on society or offending again. It was hardly surprising that when my hon. Friend the Member for Reading, East (Mr. Wilson) tabled a written question on the amount of education received in prisons, he was told on 5 November, at column 1212W of  Hansard, that prisoners at Reading prison receive less than an hour of education a day.
	The drug rehabilitation programme has a similar pattern to that for training. A prisoner waits for several weeks to get on a course, and when he finally gets on it, he is moved to another prison. He waits for a few weeks again, gets on a drug rehabilitation course, and moves on to another prison yet again before the course is completed.
	It is not only prisoners who are moved from one prison to another but, frequently, governors. It cannot be right that the average turnover time for a governor in a prison is a mere 18 months. We must have a system in which governors stay in a prison long enough to put in place initiatives that will be good for the inmates, and long enough to see those initiatives through. Given the present circumstances in prisons, it is hardly surprising that the incidence of self-harm in both prisons and youth offender institutions increased by more than 25 per cent. between 2004 and 2008.
	There has been an absolute failure to manage the prison population. The Government have ignored all the warnings about an impending crisis in prison places. That is why prison capacity is now at 99 per cent., and it would have been a lot worse were it not for the Government's early release programme, under which nearly 70,000 prisoners have been released early, including those who had been locked up for violent offences.
	The Labour manifesto of 1997 said that police should be on the beat, not pushing paper, yet 12 and a half years on, our police are being stifled by bureaucracy. Men and women join the police force not to sit behind desks, but to be out there on the streets, dealing with crime. We have the absurd situation in which the personal details of an arrested person can sometimes be recorded up to 17 times, on as many different forms.
	A different, but important, consideration that is often overlooked in such debates is the hidden cost of crime: the cost of pain and suffering endured by the victims; the cost to the national health service; the cost of social services; the cost of the stress and strain put on the family and friends of those who need to adjust to care for the victims of crime; the cost of lost wages; the cost of increased insurance premiums, and so on. Although those are the hidden costs of crime, they are nevertheless real. The Home Office has tried only once to cost the separate headings, and in 2003 the estimated figure for those hidden costs was a staggering £29 billion. I am not surprised that the Government are not keen on an annual assessment of the hidden cost of crime, because under them that figure would have increased on a regular basis.
	To conclude, I refer to the original phrase uttered by Tony Blair: "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Two weeks ago, in an article in  The Sunday Times, Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was asked to comment on whether he thought that Labour had delivered on that pledge, and his response was a diplomatic, "No comment." The Government have shown themselves to be weak on crime and weak on the causes of crime. They have shown themselves to be rich in rhetoric and poor in substance, plentiful in promises and lacking in delivery.
	After 12 years in government, six Home Secretaries, 39 junior Ministers, nearly 50 criminal justice Acts and more than 3,000 offences, the Government have still not delivered on law and order. They are past their sell-by date. More importantly, they are well past their use-by date. They need to acknowledge that it is time to go.

William Bain: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to make my maiden speech during the debate on the Gracious Speech. It is an honour for any right hon. or hon. Member to represent any constituency in this House, but it is an even more special privilege to be able to serve the community in which I was born, brought up and educated, and in which I have lived throughout my life.
	One of the upsides of having just fought the longest by-election campaign in modern history is that I was able to meet almost one in six, or 10,000, of my constituents during its course. What renewed my faith in our democratic process was having the opportunity to share my vision for Glasgow, North-East, and to hear of my constituents' hopes for their future, face to face. Despite the low turnout, the people of Glasgow, North-East care deeply about politics and about repairing the reputation of this House. They have sent me here to support the recommendations of the Kelly report, and to seek greater transparency in the way in which decisions are made by the House and our other democratic institutions.
	It was gratifying that so many of my right hon. and hon. Friends-and, indeed, right hon. and hon. Members on the Opposition Benches, particularly the right hon. Members for Witney (Mr. Cameron), for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg) and for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond)-were able to campaign in the constituency. Perhaps that contributed to the unexpected size of my majority, which was 8,111.
	I should like to share with the House a conversation that I had with a voter on the eve of polling day. Many Members may sympathise with my predicament. When I canvassed this particular elector for the third time, he greeted me with the same response that he had given on the previous two occasions. "Are you still trying?" he asked. "Yes," I said. "I cannot support any of you," he said. "None of the candidates has sufficient experience to be elected as my MP." As I prepared to concede and to consider that my efforts might be fruitless, he leaned conspiratorially over his garden fence and said "Don't worry, I will be supporting your party-not because of you, mind you; I will be voting for the Prime Minister."
	I represent a varied and interesting group of more than 20 communities in Glasgow, North-East, from Ruchill and Lambhill in the west to Hogganfield and Millerston in the east, and from Dennistoun in the south to Colston and Milton in the north. Each has its own history and character, but what they have in common is that they contain people of great humour, hard-working people, people of intelligence, talent and aspiration.
	During the campaign, I met mothers in Royston who were determined to fight for better child care so that they could work more hours to support their families. I met young people in Ruchazie who were taking the first step towards an apprenticeship through a programme run by a local voluntary group. I met retired people in Possilpark who were running a lunch club three times a week for local disabled people because of their strong sense of social responsibility. While they do not believe that Government on their own have the answer to every ill in society, nor do they believe that Government are the problem-and nor do they believe that Government should be cut back, with all the social consequences that we saw in Glasgow in the 1980s and early 1990s.
	My constituents are not as some portrayed them in the election, passive recipients of the welfare state, but people who want to see their children do better than they have done and to possess the courage and ambition to strengthen their communities. They elected me because I will stand up for their values, and will support the policies on investment in jobs, child care, pensions, tax credits and the minimum wage that will bring about a great improvement in their living standards. They support an active state that can be a force for good and has greater equality as its aim, not an enabling state that would enfeeble communities because of its withdrawal of investment in jobs or decent public services.
	The Glasgow, North-East constituency was created at the last general election from the previous seats of Glasgow, Springburn and Glasgow, Maryhill. Both areas have in the past had outstanding representatives, such as George and Agnes Hardie, John Forman, Richard Buchanan, James Craigen, Maria Fyfe-as doughty a fighter for social justice today as she was when a Member of this House-and, of course, my neighbour, the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin), whose commitment on issues such as international development I have respected for over a decade. There have even been two Conservative Members in the past: Frederick Macquiston, supporting a Liberal-Conservative coalition between 1918 and 1922, and Captain Charles Emmott of the National Government coalition between 1931 and 1935. Neither experiment has been repeated by my constituents since.
	My immediate predecessor is Lord Martin of Springburn, and of Port Dundas. He is an exceptional person and parliamentarian. My family and many others in my constituency have known him for decades, and can attest that his career has been a tribute to the best traditions of public service. I know him to be a man of great fortitude under pressure, never more so than when Speaker of this House for nearly nine years, and of great kindness. I am sure that hon. and right hon. Members will have their own memories of individual acts of encouragement or advice he gave, but no one will forget the compassion he showed to the late Patsy Calton on resuming her seat after the last general election in the midst of her brave battle with cancer.
	Lord Martin was a member of Glasgow Corporation between 1973 and 1979, and a Member of this House for 30 years, being returned with prodigious majorities in seven consecutive general elections. Key to his politics was his passion for better housing. His own experiences growing up in Anderston, together with his vision to improve his community, led him to champion the development of new social housing. He was a founder-member of what is now North Glasgow Housing Association, and the more than £100 million of investment in homes in the constituency is an achievement of which Lord Martin and this Government can justly be proud.
	As Speaker, Lord Martin was a resolute defender of the rights and privileges of the legislature from Executive encroachment. His wit, fairness and humour are missed from this House, but are now at the disposal of the other place. I wish him and his family well for the future, and it is a particular pleasure to work with his son, Paul, who is an outstanding Member of the Scottish Parliament for the area.
	Every Member representing Glasgow is also a successor to the tradition of progressive politics championed by John Wheatley and James Maxton. Their commitment to equality finds new expression in our debate today. Most of my working life has been spent in education, and I was pleased to visit recently both colleges in my constituency: John Wheatley college in Haghill, and North Glasgow college in Springburn. They provide people with high-quality further and higher education and training, transforming the life chances of, and outcomes for, my constituents.
	The most pressing issue in this debate, and for the country at large, is unemployment and how to move our economy into recovery. Although the increase in unemployment has slowed in recent months, the International Monetary Fund anticipates that it will continue to rise until 2010, and this particularly impacts upon young people. Our constituents will judge us harshly if we fail to act now. That is why we need not only a continuing fiscal stimulus, but a continuing jobs stimulus. I welcome the additional £5 billion that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has to invest in jobs for 18 to 24-year-olds and the long-term unemployed. I welcome the impact the future jobs fund is having in Glasgow, where 470 jobs have been created so far, but there is an urgent need for many more. I will shortly bring together employers, the city council and voluntary groups in my area to develop bids to bring more of this investment to Glasgow, North-East. At present, there are 1,275 jobless young people in my constituency, but only 617 employment vacancies. Had it not been for the policies followed by this Government on the new deal, the flexible new deal and the future jobs fund in the past year, the number of unemployed would have been far higher.
	We have faced the biggest shock to the global economy for more than 60 years and our European Union partners are struggling with high unemployment too. Tough economic times make the burden of child and family poverty even greater, which is why I support the Child Poverty Bill in setting targets and setting out a comprehensive strategy for the abolition of child poverty by 2020. We also need to commit across the House to the improvements in child benefit, tax credits and the minimum wage that will make it happen.
	These will be vital months in securing our economic recovery, and the jobs and living standards of millions of people will be affected by the decisions we take. Whatever our differences on policy across this Chamber, the great strength of this House is that we can rise to national challenges together. Let us face these responsibilities together and remember that greater economic fairness and equality is the prerequisite of greater liberty for the British people. I look forward to debating these issues and others with hon. and right hon. Members across this House in the coming months and to supporting the Gracious Speech in the Division Lobby today and tomorrow.

Anthony Steen: First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow, North-East (Mr. Bain) on his speech. I cannot remember when I made my maiden speech or even what I made it about, but I should say that making a successful maiden speech, such as his, is an initiation through which we all have to go to be accepted by both sides of this House. I actually listened to his speech and the fact that so many other Members were present shows that they listened to it too. We all look forward to listening to more of what he has to say, but I must tell him that the Chamber will not be as silent in future as it was then.
	I wish to discuss the absence in the Gracious Speech of the subject of human trafficking. We often hear about crimes, drugs, knife crimes and DNA, but we do not talk much in this Chamber about the problems caused by human trafficking, which exist in Scotland as much as they do in England. The fact that the United Nations put the searchlight on human trafficking shows that it is a serious international problem. In the 19th century, this horrific crime was recognised as a fundamental abuse of human rights worldwide; citizens of richer nations felt that they could, with impunity, abuse and control the lives of those less fortunate than themselves. It is not that slavery was anything new in the 19th century, as it had already existed for thousands of years, with Israelites in Egypt having been enslaved by Pharaohs. What Wilberforce did was to draw attention to it and highlight the fundamental injustice of one human being misusing and abusing another for their own personal gain. Wilberforce had amazing public relations skills, which resulted in the world banning slavery.
	Sadly, however, passing Acts of Parliament does not stop slavery. What we have got now in this country and in the world is new slavery. The United Nations figures suggest that nearly 1 million people are enslaved each year, being trafficked and exploited. Men, women and children are victims, some of forced labour, some of sexual exploitation. Trafficking has leapfrogged over arms dealing and is now second only to drug trafficking when it comes to criminal activity and gain. Human trafficking is estimated to generate annual profits for the traffickers of £32 billion.
	Wilberforce brought the slave trade to an end and the so-called developed countries moved on, but they moved on to create new slavery. Ten years ago, the subject was barely debated in the Chamber or recognised as an issue. Not much space was given to it in our debates, either here or anywhere else, because, to put it simply, there are few votes in human trafficking. It is not a matter that concerns the electorate.
	We must give credit to the Government and, in particular, to the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) in his former role as Minister of State in the Home Office for drawing attention to new slavery as it affects this country and for doing something about it. It is not about smuggling people, asylum seeking or illegal immigration. Human trafficking is something different-it deceives and misleads some of the most vulnerable people in the poorest countries into believing that there is a new and better tomorrow around the corner. It is about deception. It is about using other people's lives to make money for the trafficker.
	Yes, there are sex traffickers. There are illiterate girls with lover-boy syndrome. There are girls with little self-esteem and no education, who are often from rural backgrounds and who typically have unstable family histories. Trafficking does not just happen from poor countries to this country-it happens within this country, too. Trafficking is going on within England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and it is growing. Trafficking does not just take place from Thailand or Bulgaria-it takes place within the country as well as outside it.
	As regards child trafficking, there are children from China and Vietnam involved in the cultivation of cannabis plants. The Metropolitan police have 300 factories identified in London alone and there must be more in other parts of the country. However, it is principally children from the EU who are trafficked to steal on the streets and who are involved in ATM thefts. There is no place for these children to go into care, because there are no people with the same language who are willing to foster them and there is no room in children's homes. They are sent back to where they came from and re-trafficked. Some are under the age of 10 and an artful child can earn up to £100,000 a year for their traffickers. We have identified more than 1,000 such children already on the streets in this country, and they move between this country, Spain, Italy and back again, avoiding detection.
	Globally, there is growing awareness of how extensive trafficking is and of the different types of exploitation into which people are trafficked, but it is not visible. Of course it is not-we do not see car thieves or burglars in the act, and we do not see traffickers in the act. It is worth noting that more than twice as many people are in bondage in the world today as were ever in chains during the 350 years of the African slave trade.
	I mentioned the Minister for Schools and Learners, the hon. Member for Gedling, and I should mention the action plan that brings together the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and the Department for Children, Schools and Families. All the Government Departments are now involved. We have wonderful non-governmental organisations in this country, such as ECPAT UK-which stands for End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes-the POPPY project, the Helen Bamber Foundation and other anti-trafficking bodies. Endless groups of people are concerned about the problem, but it is still growing.
	Against that background, I want to approach the question of why the Metropolitan police are planning to close their human trafficking department. I have been one of the people who are fortunate enough to have been on the police service parliamentary scheme for the last two years; I think that I am the oldest policeman on the streets of London. It has allowed me to see the splendid work of the human trafficking team. We have 31,000 officers in the Metropolitan police, and there are only nine in the human trafficking department. The plan is to close it, as they say that it should be merged. However, if they merge it, the department's profile will be lost, as will the important work that it does.
	The Olympics mean that more people will be trafficked, and I shall give the House an idea of the numbers involved. There will be 100,000 people working on the games, as well as 10,500 athletes and 20,000 press and media people, and a total of 9 million tickets will be held by spectators. Human trafficking will increase, and it will affect the men involved in debt bondage, the children trafficked on the streets and the women trafficked for sex. To close the Metropolitan police scheme, as is being considered at the moment, would be sheer folly.
	I have the privilege to chair the all-party committee on human trafficking, and we are diametrically opposed to the human trafficking team being closed and absorbed by some other group.

Sally Keeble: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) and to have the opportunity to speak in the debate on the Gracious Speech. The hon. Gentleman's work on trafficking has been very important. My constituency has been heavily affected by trafficked women and trafficked children, so the work that he has undertaken has been valuable.
	I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North-East (Mr. Bain). It was a pleasure to hear him speak and, at a time when there is so much cynicism about politics, to hear such a straightforward, idealistic and optimistic speech. I am sure his career in the House will be long and distinguished, and I offer him many congratulations on his speech.
	There was some suggestion from the Opposition that the Queen's Speech was a waste of time and that we should be reforming Parliament or holding an election, but there is some important work to do. Some of the most important items relate to the home affairs brief and the Department for Work and Pensions portfolio, so I am particularly pleased to be able to speak in today's debate.
	One of the topics on which I wish to speak is the mandatory code on alcohol sales, which will be the subject of secondary legislation due at the end of this year or the beginning of next year. I take the opportunity to encourage my hon. Friends on the Front Bench to make sure that the code is as robust as it can be. They should not take the view that because there is an election coming along nothing should be done about alcohol. Apart from being necessary, the measures to combat binge drinking chime well with the public mood. In my constituency they have been supported at public meetings and debates and in online surveys.
	There are three aspects that concern people: labelling, in-store and happy hour-type promotions, and price controls. The controls on happy hour-type promotions partly affect price, but do not go far enough, particularly because they tend to affect pubs and clubs, whereas part of the mischief of excess drinking arises from off-licence and supermarket sales. It is important that, if we are to deal with the problems of pricing, we have measures that go across both the on trade and the off trade.
	People say that all the problems can be solved by making drink more expensive, but it is also about preventing drinking from becoming even cheaper. In Northampton, some of the pubs and clubs discount their prices so that they can become student bars, and once they have the clientele the prices drift back up. A couple of years ago, the price of a drink in the student promotion was £1.50. Now, it is two drinks-a drink and a shot-for £1. That is 50p a drink. The clubs say that if they went right down to the base price that they pay for the alcohol-without factoring in the cost of staff, maintaining the premises, and so on-the cost could be as low as 24p a unit. If alcohol started to get even close to that price, the impact on health and on law and order would be absolutely catastrophic. Minimum pricing, which I believe a mandatory code should bring in, would set a floor under that kind of discounting.
	Exactly the same would apply in supermarkets. Everyone is familiar with the argument that supermarkets get people in to buy discounted alcohol, then cross-sell to other products. Effectively, the other products, and other drinkers, are having to subsidise the cost of very cheap alcohol. Sometimes, alcohol can be cheaper than water, which is complete nonsense.
	A recent inquiry conducted by the Health Committee found that Tesco was not completely opposed to minimum pricing, and the World Health Organisation has stated:
	"Increasing the price of alcoholic beverages is one of the most effective interventions to reduce harmful use of alcohol. Consumers, including heavy drinkers and young people, are sensitive to changes in the price of drinks."
	It is the excessive drinking and binge drinking of heavy drinkers and young people in particular that is causing the greatest public concern.
	Some careful work has also been done by Sheffield university and others on the impact of pricing on alcohol consumption. Concrete results from the Sheffield studies show that a minimum price of 40p per unit of alcohol would prevent 1,400 deaths a year and produce to an estimated reduction of 41,000 hospital admissions and 16,000 incidents of crime a year. According to Alcohol Concern, a minimum price of 50p a unit would result in 3,393 fewer deaths and 45,800 fewer crimes a year, and a total saving of £7.4 billion over 10 years.
	I would also like to spell out some of the support for introducing minimum pricing or, at least, tighter controls on alcohol prices. Not just the police, the chief medical officer and others in the health world and the National Association of Head Teachers think that it would be helpful. There is also significant support in the entertainment and drinks industries themselves. Recently, the head of this country's biggest chain of nightclubs, Luminar, accompanied me to see an hon. Friend in the Home Office. We talked about the importance of providing a floor for alcohol prices to secure a more realistic base for the entertainment industry and reach a position where people choose their nightclubs based on the quality of the venue, not because they are engaged in a "how low can you go" competition in the price of drinks on offer.
	I hope that when the mandatory code is introduced towards the end of the year, it will not only deal in very strict order with information and education, but have real teeth on pricing and, in particular, look at introducing minimum pricing to combat what has been a social menace. The issue was first raised with me by constituents concerned about the impact of antisocial behaviour by young people drinking on the Moulton Leys estate.
	The second measure that I am really pleased to be able to discuss is the Child Poverty Bill, which has been carried over so that it can complete its parliamentary stages. I hope that all parties will support it not just with warm, fluffy words, but by giving real teeth to the regulations and secondary legislation that will be introduced in the new year. They will set out how our local authorities implement those measures and ensure that they tackle child poverty in their areas. However, I shall table some amendments to the Bill to strengthen its safeguards for poor families in housing, because, although the legislation already contains such proposals, they are not strong enough.
	I hope also that the legislation from the Department for Work and Pensions will include some real opportunities to provide more support for parents' flexible working. I recently undertook some research in my constituency into the impact of the recession on families in Northampton, and, with information from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, it clearly shows that as a result of the recession more women are becoming the breadwinners. They say that they are the breadwinners and take primary responsibility for the financial well-being of the family, and that their partners are taking more responsibility for child care. In those circumstances, it is important that we extend flexible working arrangements to men, if appropriate, so that they can take even more responsibility for their children, and women can pursue their careers and increase their income for the benefit of their families.
	One legacy of the recession will be changed family structures, roles and responsibilities, and I hope that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench will ensure that their proposals meet those challenges, so that families can build a more secure future.

David Burrowes: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble), who was quite right to focus on alcohol and the need for action on the problem. Indeed, there has not been such action in the past 12 years. The hon. Lady makes a good case for minimum pricing, and it must be looked at carefully.
	We have a Scottish experiment on minimum pricing. The hon. Member for Glasgow, North-East (Mr. Bain), whom I, too, commend on his maiden speech, referred to the Scottish experiment with Conservative Members of Parliament, and now we have an experiment with minimum pricing, so we will see whether it is a success. This is an important issue on which we must all reflect, but I commend to the Government the Conservative proposals for targeted tax increases on problem drinks such as alcopops and super-strength lagers. We need to take proper, targeted action in relation to the prevalence of alcohol and the menace that it causes in our communities. That reflects the fact that we have not achieved that yet, by any means.
	As ever in our home affairs debates, I declare an interest as a just-about-practising criminal solicitor with a keen interest in yet another crime Bill. Reference has been made to whether there have been 28 or nearly 50 crime and justice Bills under this Government. It reminds of me of childhood songs that my children now sing as well. They repeatedly sing the second verse of the same song a little bit louder and a little bit worse, and so it goes on. One feels that about the Government's repeated Home Office and Ministry of Justice legislation. I worry that we are just getting more of the same and more that is worse. The latest Bill has similar characteristics to all those that have gone before. In the theme of the season, we have a Christmas tree Bill. I fear that the members of the Public Bill Committee that considers it will see ever more amendments hanging off it as desperate attempts are made to introduce measures to plug the gaps, whether in relation to antisocial behaviour, crime or security.
	The other characteristic of such home affairs legislation is that the Government are dealing with a problem of their own making. In the case of the DNA database, for example, the Government are trying to catch up with court judgments and the values of our country. We have heard about mission creep and the over-involvement of innocent people, and the Government's use of secondary legislation has meant that we have not had the opportunity to debate the issue during consideration of primary legislation. A welcome aspect of the Bill is that we will have the opportunity to debate the important principles that have been under attack from this Government and the need to ensure that we have a proper balance between security and liberty.
	The Bill fails to deal with issues of repeal. In our desire to have new pieces of legislation to deal with issues of crime and justice, we must recognise the need to repeal elements of what has gone before. It is a shame that the Government do not recognise the extent of their mistakes. They would do well to look at previous legislation and to implement it-and enforce it-better. We need only look at the Criminal Justice Act 2003, a large proportion of which is not yet implemented. Parts of that Act, like many others that have gone before, are now largely discredited-for example its provisions on automatic release, particularly as they apply to people with short-term sentences. An example was recently reported in Essex of a person with a short sentence who was released automatically. Partly because of home detention curfews and their having been sentenced on a Friday, they were given the grant for their release and turned out. It is unacceptable that automatic release happens without any conditions in relation to the person's behaviour while in prison.
	I want to focus briefly on what is and is not in the Bill. It gives welcome attention to the whole area of domestic violence, particularly against women. That is a significant problem in all our communities. A particularly pernicious problem is that of repeat victimisation. That needs to be tackled in several ways, whether through enforcement-we must look carefully at those provisions in the Bill-or, as has been mooted today, through education and prevention. Many victims experience the problem of going to report an incident and facing up to seeking help. We need to recognise the role of the voluntary sector, not least in areas such as mine. There is a particular issue in relation to domestic violence in the Asian community. Organisations such as Naree Shakti-it means "women's strength"-play a role in that. The point of that organisation is to provide women with the strength to come forward and receive the ongoing support that the voluntary sector is so good at giving. We need to consider in the round how we can best tackle the problem.
	The Government wish to focus on education about domestic violence prevention, but wider matters have to be brought into sharp relief, such as the important part that drugs and alcohol sadly play in domestic violence. When one considers that, one sees the lack of funding and direction in our prevention programme. The Government and the Home Office pay all too little attention to the matter, and that needs to change. Perhaps in some ways we should not be surprised, because the Home Office's drugs strategy has led us down that path. It is less about prevention, enforcement and recovery and more about harm reduction, which has meant that the Government's focus has been on managing the problem rather than getting to the root causes of it and seeking to tackle it. We have seen the outcomes of that approach.
	Today, the Home Secretary seemed remarkably complacent about the problem of drugs in this country. Drug deaths continue to rise-they are the highest in Europe-and the cost of drug abuse, through crime and health services, has been more than £100 billion since 1998. It is important that we deal with the situation, because it is not just a crime and justice problem, but a problem for health and the wider community.
	We should not get away from the fact that the prevalence and usage of drugs has got worse. The age of initiation has come down, and we need to do more to tackle the fact that the UK is the worst in Europe for drug use. We need proper and effective treatment, but let us look at the outcome of the admittedly large amount that has gone into it. In the past year, of the 202,666 problematic drug users in treatment, how many had completed programmes to the point of becoming drug-free? Just 8,980. That is unacceptable, given the investment, and we must consider why it is the case. One problem is the Government's focus on managing the problem rather than seriously tackling it, and another is the fact that between January 2008 and this October, 20 residential rehabilitation centres closed.
	The situation is bleaker when we consider prisons. There has been a 64 per cent. increase in methadone prescribing, and few drug-free referrals are taking place. That is unacceptable and needs to change. The UK is becoming the easiest and cheapest place to get drugs, whether on the streets of Enfield in my constituency or on a wing of Pentonville or other prisons. We need to move away from simply providing treatment and towards management and recovery. We need to get away from the bureaucratic commissioning process that has led to just 3 per cent. of problematic drug users becoming drug-free. We also need to reform how we deal with criminal justice interventions, which are still leading to too much reoffending and too many damaged lives. We need to examine drug and alcohol problems and polydrug use in the round and realise that the evidence of the Home Office itself points to therapeutic communities as a way forward.
	Another matter that the Government did not touch on in the Queen's Speech was extradition, and particularly how it affects my constituent Gary McKinnon. It is welcome that the Home Secretary is considering the new medical evidence, which is compelling and significant. It deals not just with the risk of my constituent's health being affected by extradition to the United States, trial and detention, but with the fact that he has significant mental health problems aligned with his Asperger's syndrome. It is important that the Government and the Home Secretary take proper account of that evidence. I pay tribute to the Select Committee on Home Affairs for its work on the matter under the leadership of the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz).
	It is important that the Home Secretary does not hide behind the previous court judgment. He needs to realise that he cannot simply ignore the fact that a prosecution could take place in-country, and he cannot simply say that the bar is far too high for the case to attract his discretion because of human rights concerns. We all recognise that extradition arrangements need to be in place to fight global crime and ensure that we are not a safe haven for criminals, but Gary McKinnon does not fall into that bracket. He is a vulnerable man who hacked into computers and is now at significant risk. His life is at risk, and in a recent case in the High Court, Lord Justice Stanley Burnton recognised that if extradition did not take place, Gary McKinnon could be prosecuted here.
	We also need to recognise the important principle of proportionality. That needs to be balanced to ensure that the mental health concerns that are now prevalent are taken properly into account. There is no assurance of bail and repatriation. Holland and Israel were able to reach an agreement on the matter, but this country has not, which has done a disservice to British citizens. We need to review the extradition treaty-and a new Government to do that-but with Gary McKinnon, who is a victim of an unbalanced process, we need to recognise that the medical reports give ample grounds to ensure that human rights can be played in his interests, as they need to be. He needs to stay in this country.
	Finally, reference has been made to victims. Victims may get some new legislation, but fundamentally, we need criminal justice reform, which will have to wait for a new Government.

Phil Wilson: I welcome the measures in the Gracious Speech because they will be good for Britain, the north-east of England and Sedgefield. I believe that they build on the successes of the Government over the past 12 years. This Government's record is built on proud achievements. When faced with an international crisis, they have stepped up to the plate and delivered.
	When I survey my constituency and see how it is coping with the global challenges that I see around us, I see that unemployment has risen since 2008, but that is still half what it was in the mid-1980s. I ask myself why. Is it because the recession is being left to run its course, or because smart government, not dogma, is getting us through it? In Sedgefield, about 19,000 pensioners receive the winter fuel allowance and 9,500 people receive tax credits. Is that because of an act of charity, or is it because of smart government acting on behalf of our society to look after the most vulnerable in it? In 1997 in County Durham, one in four young people who left school did so without a qualification; today the figure is just over one in 10, and beneath the national average. Is that a result of a whip-round by parents to buy extra books and pencils, or is it because of investment in children, schools and teachers, because this Government know that our children need to be properly equipped for the 21st century? An international survey of 10,000 health practitioners says that the NHS provides the best primary health care in the world. Is that a result of charity, or is it because of public investment in thousands more doctors and nurses by a Government who created the NHS and who believe that health care should be free at the point of need-a principle that is deep in the DNA of the Labour party and the Labour Government?
	The answer to all those questions is obviously smart government-this Government, who are guided by the principles of compassion, solidarity and an understanding that the wealth the economy creates is there for the many, not just the few.
	When I hear accusations of a broken society, I think back to the 18 years immediately before 1997. When we look at unemployment, it is only right that we remind ourselves of those times. Today, there are more than 2.5 million more people in work than in 1997, and about 1.5 million people on jobseeker's allowance. In the 1980s, more than 3 million people were claiming the equivalent benefit. Of those, 40 per cent. had been on the dole for 12 months and more.
	Youth unemployment is a worry to us all, but of 943,000, more than 250,000 are full-time students. If you take those out, the unemployment rate for under-25s is just over 9 per cent. In the 1980s, it was 13 per cent., and in the 1990s, it was 12 per cent. Today, because of smart government, 70 per cent. of JSA recipients are back in work within six months.
	How can people say that we live in a broken society when the murder rate is at its lowest for the past 20 years, and when overall crime is down by 39 per cent. and violent crime by 41 per cent? How can we be in a broken society when more than 70 per cent. of adults volunteer at least once a year, and when three quarters of all 13 to 19-year-olds take part in sports or clubs or volunteer? A broken society is mentioned only by those who do not care about public services because they do not need to use them, and who say that charity is the answer because they know they will never need it.
	Charities have a role, but they can never be a substitute for smart government. Smart government gives millions of British people a fair deal. That is the responsibility of an elected Government; they must speak up for the needs of society and not outsource them. I always find that people who want to get the Government off their backs are usually those who think they can afford to be without the Government. They want to see less government and less regulation. But they are the first to come to the taxpayer if their business is going under or their bank has failed and wring their hands because regulation was after all too lax. Smart government says that the public and private sectors should work together, and that the people should always come first.
	There is of course an alternative. It is an alternative that says that instead of Building Schools for the Future, parents or a charity can rent an office block to set up a school. It is the alternative that says that 18 months for an operation is not too long to wait. It is the alternative that says it is the role of financial markets to make money out of other people's misery. It is the alternative that puts Britain on the fringes of Europe because it ignores the fact that 60 per cent. of our trade is with Europe and 3 million jobs depend on it. It is the world of "Little Britain", not Great Britain. It is the alternative that breaks cast-iron guarantees while the party that represents that alternative is still in opposition, where long may it remain. It is an alternative of a party whose shadow Chancellor, the hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) bizarrely says that it would be on the side of the NHS, when actually it is the party of a past in which patients waited six months for an appointment and two years for an operation. It is an alternative that thinks that the NHS is a mistake 60 years in the making. It is an alternative that will use the means test in reverse by saying to pensioners that they can have social care as long as they can put £8,000 up front. It is the alternative of a party whose leader said in his conference speech that
	"it falls to the modern Conservative Party to fight for the poorest".
	On hearing the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) say that on the television, I immediately changed over to the weather channel to see whether hell had indeed frozen over, because that will be the day that I will believe that statement.
	The Opposition are no longer just the Conservatives apparently: they are now progressive Conservatives. But how can they be progressive and conservative at the same time? I checked the "Oxford English Dictionary" to get a definition for both words. It defined progressive as "favouring change and innovation". For conservative, it said, "averse to change or innovation." So there we have it-a political philosophy that is a contradiction in terms, schizophrenic, Jekyll and Hyde, pulling one way then another, pointing in two directions at the same time, and just plain wrong.
	We know the Opposition: we met them on the street corner of the communities they closed down in the 1980s. We saw them turn their backs as child poverty soared under them. We heard them when they said that unemployment was a price worth paying. What they say and do are two different things-just look at their commitments and compare them with those of the Government. The first alternative policy they have to smart government is to reduce inheritance tax and give a £200,000 tax cut to each of the 3,000 richest estates. They will cut payments for people on incapacity benefit without investing in the measures needed to find them work. The Opposition put thousands of people on benefit when they were in power in the 1980s and 1990s, and a generation was lost. It was left to this Government to pick up the pieces, as we have been doing.
	The hon. Member for Tatton keeps saying that we are all in this together, but he wants people on modest incomes to take a pay freeze and work longer. It is easy to say that we are all in this together when you are a millionaire, can retire when you want to and do not have to worry about paying the bills. The Government have introduced a 50 per cent. tax rate for those earning more than £150,000 a year, because we do believe that we are all in this together.
	The right hon. Member for Witney blames "big government". In my view, it is just as well that our Government were big enough and smart enough to take the decisions to save the economy from total collapse. It is just as well that our Government are big enough and smart enough to fund 100,000 jobs for young people; help 300,000 families with their mortgages; and sign 200,000 agreements with businesses allowing them more time to pay their tax bills and keep people in work.
	The Opposition now claim that community is in their DNA. Well, it was not in their DNA when they were last in government, when real, long-term mass unemployment was evident on every street corner and plagued our communities. If community was not in their DNA then, it cannot be in their DNA now. Their DNA has done nothing but mutate into a split personality, saying one thing and doing another. But we know the truth. We are mending the broken society that they left behind. We know because we took the tough decisions that they opposed on the economy. We know the truth because Labour has built more than 100 new hospitals. There are hundreds of new or refurbished schools. In the north-east, deaths by heart disease have fallen by 58 per cent., and cancer deaths by 28 per cent. We still have much to do, but Labour's intent is clear: we are on the side of the people. The truth is that we created the NHS, but the Tories voted against it; we introduced the minimum wage, but the Tories voted against it; we created Sure Start, but the Tories voted against it; we stand for the many, but the Tories will stand by the few; we stand for fairness, but they will stand by the privileged. That is the choice that we face.
	I am optimistic about the future. We need a Government who are smart and big in character to face up to the future-and they are this Government. There are challenges ahead. If ever there was proof that we live in a globalised world, it was the turmoil in the global economy over the past year. People who live in the villages and towns in my constituency need to know that we will look after them in the future; that the benefits of a globalised economy will not pass them by; that the people who run the global economy and financial markets do not remain faceless gamblers and that what they get up to is transparent and accountable, and not socially useless; and that the major economies act in unison through the G20 and, if necessary, the introduction of a Tobin tax to dampen down the casino economy and to provide a safe and stable world of savings and investment for ordinary people.
	As I look at the register of donors to the Conservative party, I see bankers, hedge fund managers, tycoons, such as Lord Ashcroft, and people who believe in a casino economy and who got us into this mess in the first place. I guess that they will vote for the Conservative party, because it represents their interests. That is another reason I know that the Labour party will win the next election.

John Mason: I congratulate my neighbouring colleague, the hon. Member for Glasgow, North-East (Mr. Bain), on an excellent maiden speech. I hope that he will be available to his constituents and take on some of the case work that I have been covering in recent months-I had to survive only three weeks of a campaign, but he had four or five months, which is extraordinary. He mentioned several important issues on which I hope he will press the Government, because there might be slight differences between him and his Front-Bench colleagues. For example, perhaps it is time that we saw an increase in the minimum wage. He suggested that a fiscal stimulus would help unemployment, whereas, I believe, his Front-Bench colleagues are planning cuts.
	I will concentrate on the proposal to abolish attendance allowance and disability living allowance for over-65s, which would affect 2.4 million vulnerable pensioners-1.6 million claiming attendance allowance and 800,000 living on DLA. We have received various reassurances from Ministers suggesting that people will receive similar services, rather than money. On Thursday, the Health Secretary said that
	"people will be guaranteed an equivalent level of support".-[ Official Report, 19 November 2009; Vol. 501, c. 241.]
	"Equivalent level of support" could mean cash, home help or similar support in kind, and people are asking, "Which is it?" It is not good enough. That phrase is worrying a lot of people and I hope that we will receive some clarification. Clearly, the same money cannot be in two places at the same time, so increasing services in one area will mean cuts in payments in another area, and presumably the people who lose attendance allowance will not necessarily be the people who receive the new services.
	Attendance allowance and DLA do a lot of good. I shall quote from a briefing that I received from the Scottish Association for Mental Health. It provides several examples of how DLA and attendance allowance can be used to good effect, but we are short of time, so I shall limit how much I quote. It states:
	"Disability benefits and free personal care enable older people in Scotland to remain independent in the community, providing older people with a personal budget to help with their care and support needs. This could include covering the costs of a friend or family member coming to the home in the morning to help the person get out of bed, prepare meals or do shopping and cleaning. Any changes to disability benefits could affect the provision of this care and support and result in an older person needing more costly forms of social care in the home or lead to a person moving into residential care if they were not able to manage their household."
	SAMH gives similar examples:
	"Changes could increase the pressures on informal carers which could limit the opportunities of carers being able to work and therefore lead to them not contributing through the income tax system."
	The fear is of a lose-lose situation.
	The other concern is that I thought that we were aiming to support direct payments. In fact, the Welfare Reform Act 2009, which went through Committee only recently and which I was involved with, made some good statements in that direction. For example, clause 30 of the then Bill said:
	"The purpose of this Part is to enable disabled people aged 18 or over to exercise greater choice in relation to, and greater control over, the way in which relevant services...are provided to or for them".
	The idea is to move to giving people more control over their services, but if we abolish attendance allowance, it appears that there will be less control.
	What will happen to the money if DLA and attendance allowance are abolished for Scotland and Wales? Will it be handed over as a lump sum? If so, will the amount be based on need or on the Barnett formula of population? Will it be open to the devolved Governments to continue with attendance allowance in Scotland and Wales, even if they do not continue in England? Perhaps we could also have some clarification about whether only new claimants are affected, or will some of the current recipients lose benefits? There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about that, too. Can we have a clear statement from the Minister? I do not think that disabled pensioners and their carers should have to wait for clarification on that key issue.
	There is also the potential for an impact on carer's allowance, which is extremely low at the moment, at £53.10. However, what happens if carer's allowance is paid to someone who looks after a person receiving attendance allowance and attendance allowance is abolished? It seems bizarre to me that the party planning to cut benefits is the Labour party. That is the kind of thing that I would have expected from the Tories, who seem to be the ones trying to protect those benefits, although I do not entirely trust their version of events. That is a reverse from my younger days, perhaps 30 years ago, when Labour was to the left of the Tories. Many of my constituents now tell me that they cannot tell the difference. I fear that parts of the electorate still think that Labour is the party that will protect the poor and downtrodden, but when I hear things such as what I have described, it makes me wonder.
	Clearly there are overlaps between work and pensions and other aspects of the Queen's Speech, such as health. Another example is the minimum wage. If the Government are strapped for cash, why are we subsidising profitable employers to pay below a living wage? Tax credits are a good thing, because they boost the income of low earners. I certainly welcome that, but the Government's policies effectively mean that we are encouraging some employers to pay a wage that people cannot live on. I consider that to be immoral. If we are looking at benefits and encouraging people into work, part of the equation has to be increasing the minimum wage.
	Let me briefly discuss one or two other areas of concern that have been mentioned today. We certainly welcome the Child Poverty Bill. There has been a lot of support for the Bill from across the House, but there is concern that we will not be even halfway there by 2010-11. The Home Secretary said in opening this debate that he hoped to be there, but I do not think that he was widely believed. There are apparently no resources coming in to support the intention to abolish child poverty by 2020. The hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) said that there would be "real teeth" in the Bill, but I have seen no sign of teeth whatever. Indeed, I would like to see what those "real teeth" might be, and that is without mentioning the fact that taking child poverty down to only 10 per cent. is hardly abolishing it.
	I do not want to spend much time on immigration, but it has been mentioned once or twice. There are just a couple of points that I would like to make, the first of which is about bogus colleges. We need action on that issue, on which there is agreement across the House. The colleges in my area, including John Wheatley college, which covers an area that I share with the hon. Gentleman, are concerned about the issue, as I know Scottish colleges will be in future.
	At the same time, while there is concern about people coming in in an uncontrolled manner, my own experience is that the Border Agency can be extremely strict with a lot of people. As I have mentioned before, a pipe band from Pakistan was refused entry and I know that a number of people from north America who had been well funded to work with the homeless in Glasgow, for example, or who had come to speak at a Christian conference have been sent right back from the airport. Yes, we need border controls, but there also needs to be flexibility. I echo the point made previously that Scotland's population is such that we would welcome more people coming in and boosting our economy.
	The final area I want to touch on briefly is the Calman commission, which I believe is an omission from the Queen's Speech. Whether it was there in the original version or not is a matter for debate, but the reality is that there is no firm commitment by the Government to take forward the Calman commission's proposals, despite the fact that many of them could very easily be brought into being. Sir Kenneth Calman himself said of his report:
	"I think there are a lot of bits, as I mentioned, which I think can be implemented quickly and easily without too much fuss, others will take a bit of time to think through."
	I appeal to the Government, where there is agreement across the board, not to leave matters until after the election, which will only cause delay. Let us act sooner rather than later.
	The drink-driving limit is one example. Clearly, there is an alcohol problem in Glasgow and the west of Scotland and I know that it exists south of the border as well. Minimum pricing has been mentioned, which we certainly welcome and encourage for Scotland. I hope that the hon. Lady and others who have spoken in support of this measure will speak to their colleagues in Scotland and encourage them to support it, too. If Northern Ireland can have separate limits for drink-driving, surely it would be helpful if we moved quickly so that Scotland can take a lead, as I argued earlier that it has on other issues.

Phyllis Starkey: I think that you have a certain sense of humour, Mr. Deputy Speaker, in asking to me to follow the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies). Unsurprisingly, I am not sure that he and I share the same culture or values. I certainly do not share his astonishing assertions about the Human Rights Act 1998, which simply betray his lack of understanding of the way in which it incorporated within UK law a convention that was signed long ago and to which I hope every civilised Government throughout the world would adhere. However, I am grateful to him for demonstrating what the Conservative party is really like; had the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) been in the Chamber, I imagine that he would have been blushing even redder than he was at Prime Minister's questions at the way in which his veneer of compassionate conservatism was being dragged aside so that we could see the real face of the Tory party. I hope and imagine that the voters will not be as deceived as the right hon. Gentleman perhaps wishes them to be.
	The issue that I wish to discuss is addressed in the Crime and Security Bill and is of enormous concern to my constituents. I am talking about wheel-clamping and the proposals to get to grips, finally, with the cowboy wheel clampers who operate on private land. This issue-the control of the private security industry-was one of the first campaigns that I took up when I got elected to this place. I was trying to campaign for the licensing of door supervisors-more popularly known as "bouncers". At the time, they were licensed separately by local authorities and there was no national scheme. I am pleased that this Government did eventually introduce the Security Industry Authority, which has licensed many aspects of the private security industry, including door supervisors. That has brought a degree of order to the industry, and has vastly improved protection for members of the public and standards across the industry. However, one aspect remains unregulated and that is wheel-clamping on private land.
	Obviously, owners of private land have every right to stop people parking on their land-that is clearly unarguable-but there has been an upsurge of problems in my constituency, particularly in Bletchley, in the south of the constituency, on a number of sites in the centre where it is not at all obvious to people that they are on private land. In the case of one major site, nobody had asserted ownership rights for some years and it had, in effect, been used as a public car park, even though it was private land-the site is adjacent to an actual public car park.
	The building that was in the car park was converted into residential flats and the private owner, thus, hired a wheel-clamping firm to assert his right to stop people parking on that land. Consequently, many of my constituents who had been in the habit of parking unmolested on the land were suddenly subject to wheel-clamping, and the way in which those wheel clampers operated is wholly outrageous. There was virtually no signage, and the signs that there were measured 12 inches by 15 inches and were written in black on red-the most unreadable combination. The car clampers used to loiter around the corner, waiting for people to park and leave their vehicle before leaping out and shoving on the car-clamping device.
	The clampers behaved in an appalling way to drivers, and among the various people who have contacted me are innumerable pensioners who have had their cars clamped and had money demanded from them. One individual was with his wife, who suffers from type 1 diabetes. As a result of the stress, she started to have a hypoglycaemic episode. The car clampers insisted on their money while the man's wife fell on to the floor and into a coma. He was phoning an ambulance on his mobile phone while trying to continue the altercation with the car clampers over the money and over the fact that they would not release the clamp so that he could at least take his wife to hospital. Another constituent, an elderly pensioner, had an asthma attack as a result of the stress caused by the actions of these individuals. One of the other car parks is connected to residential flats but is right next door to the job centre. A couple of people who were going to the job centre had their car clamped in the car park, too.
	So, there is poor signage, the appalling way in which the wheel clampers have behaved and the fact that they have demanded payments in cash. They have allowed people to pay by another method in only a tiny number of cases, and that other method involves walking to the nearest cash machine with the car clampers to get the money out and give it to them. Some people who did not have enough money on them or who did not have their card have been forced to walk home to get the money and to come back to get their car released. The fine has been extortionate-they have been demanding £150 from people when, in some cases, cars have been parked for only about four minutes before they have been clamped.
	It is understandable that my constituents have become increasingly outraged and that my local newspaper, the  Milton Keynes Citizen, has taken up the campaign and has helped to co-ordinate the information that we have gathered from across the constituency. I have been feeding that information through to Ministers to strengthen their commitment to introducing regulation to control the private wheel clampers.
	I want to reiterate the measures that are essential to the regulations. First, there must be clear signage of sufficient size and clarity, so that people know before they go on to the land that they are driving on to private land. Obviously, if drivers know that they are likely to get a penalty, on their own head be it. Secondly, there must be a cash limit on the level of fine that such individuals can apply. Thirdly, they must not be able to demand it in cash. There must be facilities for people to pay by card. Fourthly, a proper receipt must be given that records the place and time, the name of the operator and the address of the firm responsible so that individuals can check whether the firm is licensed with the Security Industry Authority. Finally, there must be a clear and independent appeals mechanism, as there is for parking fines when people park in council car parks, to ensure that the fines are operating reasonably. I hope that Ministers will be able to assure me that all that can be included.
	I cannot give up the opportunity to make two or three other remarks on some of the issues that came up earlier in the debate that relate to various parts of the Home Office. First, I want to take this opportunity to say that my constituents have greatly valued many of the improvements that have been introduced in policing, in particular neighbourhood policing. Neighbourhood policing and community support officers have made a huge difference to the way in which low-level but extremely annoying crime is detected and dealt with in the neighbourhoods around Milton Keynes. It is still improving as it beds down, but it has been immensely valuable.
	The second issue is CCTV. A while ago, there was a particularly nasty murder in my constituency. A group of youths were fighting and one of them was killed, and CCTV was invaluable not only in convicting the youths who were responsible but for absolving some of the other youths milling about in the fracas and who were not responsible for the fatal incident. It needs to be said that CCTV is a valuable adjunct to crime detection, both for convicting people and for absolving the innocent. I have certainly had evidence of that in my constituency.
	Finally, I want to say a word about statistics, which have been very misused. I reiterate the need that MPs and others must have some mathematical education, as many people here seem to be completely innumerate. The initiative to improve the way we deal with domestic violence is bound to lead to an increase in the numbers of detected crimes of domestic violence. That will be a good thing. The initiative will not increase the rate of domestic violence but it will encourage people to report it, in the knowledge that incidents will be taken seriously. Exactly the same thing has happened with hate crime: because if people are assured that they will be taken seriously, they are more likely to report incidents of hate crime. The statistics suggest that the incidence of hate crime has gone up, but that is because we have recognised the problem, not because it is happening more often.

Charles Walker: I am terrified to be following my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), as I want to speak about prison reform. I am aware that many people in prison fully deserve to be there because they have committed heinous crimes. I do not argue that prison does not work-it does, as people in prison are not on the street committing crimes-but too often we see the revolving door in action. We see people go to prison for a period of time, leave prison, and within a year 48 per cent. have reoffended and many of those people are back in prison. In the case of youngsters, as many as 75 per cent. reoffend within a year and end up back in prison.
	That is not good value for the taxpayer. The prison population is a captive audience, and that means that we must do something with them. I know that some progress has been made in that direction, but a great deal more remains to be done. Some 50 per cent. of prisoners have literacy and numeracy rates that are lower than an 11-year-old's, and they are simply incapable of functioning in the real world. A survey found that half of all prisoners were not qualified to do 96 per cent. of the jobs available outside prison, in the community. So we really must do something with the people who are in prison: we need to work on them to make them better people and to allow them to become fulfilled people able to turn their backs on crime
	When I came to Parliament, I was not a very moderate or relaxed person. I very much believed that people in prison fully deserved to be there, for as long and as often as possible, but 10 per cent. of our current prison population-a total of 8,000 people-formerly served in our armed forces. These are people who made significant sacrifices for this country, so why are they now in prison? How did we let them down so badly that they ended up there? Many more will follow unless we do something about the problem. We in this place know that many young men who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq in recent history are now in prison. Somewhere, therefore, we are letting those brave young people down, and it is a scandal that 8,000 current prisoners used to be in our armed forces.
	Furthermore, prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill. We closed down the asylums 30 years ago and moved many of the people into prisons. Some 40 or 50 per cent. of prisoners have undiagnosed mental health problems. I am not saying that people with mental health problems cannot do bad things. Of course they can. However, I am saying that mental health problems can be a significant contributory factor to people making the wrong choices in life, and consistently making the wrong choices in life.
	Prison will not be a deterrent to an undiagnosed or untreated schizophrenic, so when we have people in prison who are ill, let us do something to help them. Let us do something to make them better. Every year that they spend in prison costs taxpayers £40,000. As my hon. Friend pointed out, if we let prisoners out unreformed and untreated, they do a lot more damage in society for the period that they are out of prison, then they go back to prison time and again and cost us a further £40,000 each time. This is not good enough.
	My hon. Friend also pointed out that many prisoners suffer from drug addiction problems, and we know that drug addiction leads people to commit serious criminal offences. The scandal is that more people come out of prison as drug addicts than go in, so we need treatment programmes in prison to ensure that we clean these people up and get them to a position where they can go back into society, hold down a responsible job and start giving back to the community, as opposed to taking away from the community. That is why it is so important that when people are in prison, we do something with them on the educational and training front. We must give them the skills that they require to go and compete in the jobs market.
	I am all in favour of building more prisons in the short to medium term, because unless we relieve prison overcrowding, we will not be able to address the underlying causes of reoffending. When prisons are overcrowded, it becomes purely a management issue for prison officers and the governors, as opposed to a rehabilitation issue. So let us, in the short to medium term, build more prisons so that we can start to have the space in the criminal justice system to rehabilitate people back into society, instead of sending out better criminals. Indeed, it is debatable whether we are sending out better criminals. To get into prison in the first place, they have to be caught, so they are not learning their skills from particularly bright operators.
	It is important, going ahead, that as we clean up our communities and make society a safer place, we start to address seriously the revolving door of prison. Let us be sure that when people go to prison for a significant period, we use that time to make that prisoner a better person. Certainly, punish them. Having their liberty removed is a punishment. For many of these people, going to drug treatment classes-

Lynne Jones: I am very glad to be following the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker), as I am certainly more on his wavelength than that of the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies).
	One thing that has always dismayed me during my time as a Member of this House is the misuse or ignoring of evidence in order to justify unjustifiable policies. One particularly bad example involves drugs policies, and both Front Benches are guilty in that regard. That is not what I intend to talk about today, however. I want to concentrate on a particularly bad example of the misuse of statistics.
	On 13 November, articles about household benefits appeared in a number of the tabloids. The  Daily Express carried the headline "Shameless Labour. Toll of families on £15,000 benefits doubles to 1.2 million since Labour came to power". The article went on to say:
	"Last night, critics described the massive handouts as a grim indictment of the flourishing welfare dependency culture fostered by Gordon Brown. The statistics sparked new anger about the growing burden on the working population, having to pay for claimants languishing in a lifetime of taxpayers-subsidised indolence."
	In the article, housing benefit, incapacity benefit and jobseeker's allowance were all described as "handouts". Only at the end of the article was it mentioned that the figures included pensioners, the disabled and people caring for the elderly and infirm.
	Another tabloid, the  Daily Mail, had the headline "Benefits Britain". The article went on to say:
	"The number of families raking in more than £12,000 a year in benefits has trebled since Labour came to power, figures showed yesterday. Britain's culture of spiralling welfare dependency means 300,000 households now receive that figure or more in benefits-up from 100,000 in 1997. A worker would have to earn £27,000 a year to take home £20,000."
	The headline in  The Sun was "300,000 coin £20k in benefit bonanza", with the newspaper suggesting that that was more than many workers take home. Even the  Daily Mirror agreed:
	"The number of families on £20,000 a year in welfare handouts has risen threefold".
	The source of these stories was information obtained from a written parliamentary question from the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), who was extensively quoted in the aforementioned articles as saying:
	"These figures show the shocking growth of a dependency culture under Labour. The Government needs to get to grips with Britain's benefit culture and radically reform our welfare system. It's hardly surprising that so many people spend their lives on benefits when in some cases they can get as much on benefits as many people earn in work."
	But the figures do not show a shocking growth in dependency. They are taken from the family resources survey, and they are rounded to the nearest 100,000 of population. It is not therefore valid, for example, to describe a change from 100,000 to 200,000 as a doubling. Those figures could mask a change from 149,000 to 151,000, which is hardly a change at all. As the Library specialist told me, it is better to look at the percentage of households for which the change is less dramatic, if it exists at all.
	Let us first look at the number of households that said that they receive more than £15,000. Based on rounded-up survey samples in 1997-98, there were about 600,000 such households, equating to 3 per cent. of all households, of which 500,000 had at least one member of working age. By 2007-08, the overall numbers had, indeed, doubled to 1.2 million, or 4 per cent. of households, but the figure for household members of working age had not increased significantly at all: it was still about 600,000, or 2 per cent. of households.
	If there was any story from those figures, it was the large increase in the number of pensioner households that receive benefits of more than £15,000 per annum. The number had increased from 100,000 to 600,000 during the period in question. That is not a twofold or threefold increase, but a sixfold increase, so why did the right hon. Member for Maidenhead not congratulate the Government on helping the most vulnerable pensioners, those with disabilities and extensive care needs? The headline should have read "Labour pride", not "Labour shame".
	On the numbers of households receiving more than £20,000, the figures are so low as to be meaningless. The table from the written answer on the number of households with persons of working age gives the following percentages: 1997-98, 1 per cent.; 1998-99, 1 per cent.; 1999-2000, 0 per cent.; 2000-01, 0 per cent.; 2001-02, 1 per cent.; 2003-04, 1 per cent.; 2004-05, 1 per cent.; 2005-06, 1 per cent.; 2006-07, 1 per cent.; and 2007-08, 1 per cent. Only if pensioner households are included does the percentage rise to 2 per cent. or 3 per cent.
	There is a similar story on housing benefit. The Tories have put out scare stories about the increase in the housing benefit bill, but given that the number of social homes has decreased by 1 million since 1995, making more people dependent on the private sector, it is not surprising that the bill has gone up.
	I think that I have established beyond doubt that the Opposition are not averse to misusing statistics. Their leader did so in his speech to their party conference, maligning the Labour Government on poverty while conveniently forgetting the huge rise in poverty under the Tories. Thank God they have not been in power through the recent recession.
	It is particularly odious to misuse statistics in a way that pillories vulnerable people and panders to the lowest form of populism. We have seen the Tories recently put about completely unwarranted scare stories about the Government taking away disability living allowance and attendance allowance from pensioners. Then the next day, as I have shown, the same people-those pensioners-are portrayed as undeserving and a part of the dependency culture.
	The Tories have tried to portray themselves as caring and honest, but in reality we see that they are still the nasty party, with the hon. Member for Monmouth being the exemplar par excellence.

Nadine Dorries: The speeches that we have heard today have oscillated between both ends of the spectrum in terms of quality, and this evening I will attempt to make my own small contribution.
	I was incredibly disappointed with the Home Office aspect of the Crime and Security Bill, because I should very much have liked it to cover two particular areas: the UK's current drug problems, about which there should have been greater detail; and the lack of trust between the police and the community.
	I begin by talking about the drug problems that we face in the UK. The charity Addaction estimates that drug-related crime costs this country £110 billion a year. Of course, it is almost impossible to calculate the actual cost because there is a huge personal cost in terms of families, lost lives, and children and teenagers who become addicted to drugs and then go on to have lives that are meaningless. The figure of £110 billion is incredibly large-although it may even be on the conservative side-given the economic crisis and the Government's having to look at public spending in various Departments. One would therefore have thought the Bill might do something to deal with the problem.
	Let us look at what the Government's strategy has been over the past 12 years. Shortly after they came to power, they introduced a 10-year strategy to combat the misuse of drugs. Ten years later, they issued another strategy that was almost identical to the first one. It was about maintaining and containing the drugs problem. It was not about dealing with or reducing the problem, but managing it. That is borne out by the number of methadone prescriptions, which have gone up by 71 per cent. In 2007, there were 1 million prescriptions; in 2008, there were 1.8 million. That huge increase proves in itself that the whole strategy is about maintenance.
	We know-because it has been proven by a rehabilitation centre in Stevenage that has a 70 per cent. success rate-that the only way to deal with a young person's drug problem is abstinence. That means putting them into rehabilitation, removing their source of drugs, making them go through cold turkey, and giving them the support that they need. That has never been this Government's policy; despite its being a proven treatment method that works, it has never been adopted. Yet they are also the Government who declassified cannabis and then reclassified it as a class A drug. Their message to young people has been one of total confusion. They say, "Cannabis is not as serious as we thought it was. Oh yes, whoops, sorry, it is-we're going to reclassify it as class A. We're not going to do anything about treatment for the addiction or about the people at the school gate, the drug pushers, peddlers and pimps-we're just going to up the number of methadone prescriptions and give people an alternative to the drugs that they've been taking all this time." That is not a solution, and it is part of what is breaking down our society.
	When I recently visited Styal women's prison, every single offender was in there for a drug-related crime. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) talked about the need to create more prisons. If we dealt with the drug problem properly-in a way that worked, using abstinence and rehabilitation on a day-care or residential basis-we would not need to build extra prisons because the drug-related crime numbers would fall and we would not need those extra spaces. The financial cost of crime would also be reduced considerably, and we would be a much better society as a result. It is not only about the young people whose lives are lost as a result of drugs, but about the people who are victims of the crimes committed in pursuit of the drugs needed to sustain a habit.

Nadine Dorries: I absolutely agree. That is partly why it is so difficult to calculate the true extent of the problem. However, the figures that my hon. Friend quoted, and other figures, reveal the depth of the problem that we are dealing with.
	It is a shame that in their final Gracious Speech, the Government have produced a Bill that deals with clamping and antisocial behaviour, but not with the worst antisocial behaviour that we face, which is a result of the drug problem. It is a huge shame that they have missed this golden opportunity to make a better society and deal with a problem that they have tried, and failed comprehensively, to deal with over the past 12 years. It was a golden opportunity to say to the people of the nation, "We understand the drug problem. We understand that there are many victims of crime as a result of drugs, so we are going to produce some really good treatment programmes, such as abstinence."
	I wish to touch on the erosion of the community's trust in the police. That may be because of the de Menezes shooting or police storming into the offices of an MP without a search warrant or permission in a politically motivated manner. It may be because the police are arresting people to take DNA without their permission. No Home Office Bill can be implemented without the people having trust in the police. Without communities working with the police, there is almost no point in bringing forward a Home Office Bill, because it will be impossible to implement.
	What can we do to improve trust in the police? We can make them more accountable to the people. When I write to my chief constable with a complaint from a constituent, somebody else writes back to me-an allocated department or another officer. Nobody in the police is accountable to the general public on a day-to-day, issue-by-issue basis.
	The Crime and Security Bill would have been fantastic if it had somewhere in it the introduction of an elected police commissioner or some way of making the police accountable to the people. The argument that Labour Members frequently give is that that would mean politicisation of the police, and that if we bring politics into the police force at local level we will be doomed. However, the announcement by the Association of Chief Police Officers this weekend that it wanted to introduce a register of men who have been reported for committing two or more domestic violence attacks was politicisation. It shows the police acting in a political manner and considering something that will appease the Government of the day. It is not a policy that says, "Let's introduce something that will get rid of all the drug pushers at the school gates at 4 o'clock every day."
	So why not use the Bill to bring in elected police commissioners, who people could go to the polls to vote for at the same time as voting for us? Then when something went wrong in a particular area and the MP or the general public wanted to hold someone to account, they could go to that directly elected commissioner. He or she in turn could hold the local police board to account. We do not have that, and it is another golden opportunity missed in the Bill.
	In my constituency, I suffer with the problem of clamping, which is covered in the Bill, on residential streets as well as in areas owned by the local authority. People come to my surgery on a weekly basis with stories of hardship about how they have been dealt with. As the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) said, people who do not have the financial wherewithal to pay the £150 on-the-spot fine can suffer hardship as a result. Once they pay the fine, some cannot keep their car, and some may not be able to keep their job. They are people who are living on the edge and trying to keep together their home and livelihood, and they find themselves suddenly having to pay £150 to get their car back. If they have to borrow that money as they do not have it that day, the cost escalates and is ramped up. If the Bill is used to protect those people from that hardship, that will be a good move. However, that is the only thing in the Bill that I can see will be of any particular use to people who are looking for something to make their life a little more crime-free and a little easier.
	I will therefore sit down and bemoan the fact that the Government have not even acknowledged that abstinence programmes work, and that they have not put anything in the Bill to point up that directly elected police commissioners would be a good idea and something to debate in the House. I hope they use the Bill to produce something to make people's lives better which, ironically, would be on the issue of the clamping of cars.

Theresa May: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was pointing out that the approach of harking back to the past was followed by the hon. Members for Sedgefield and for Jarrow, but the latter also referred to his long-standing campaign on pleural plaques.
	There were a number of thoughtful contributions to the debate on the subject of violence against women and the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (John Austin) made a very thoughtful speech. He rightly commended the white ribbon campaign and highlighted the importance of involving men in the work to end violence against women. He reminded us that violence against women takes many forms, a theme that was echoed by my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), whom I commend on his valuable work as chairman of the all-party group on human trafficking, which is-as he said in his speech-the new slavery. My hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr. Burrowes) also reminded us of the impact of violence in various forms against women in certain communities, including the Asian community, and the importance of working with local communities to combat that violence.
	On the issue of crime, my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) reminded us of the need to get more police on the streets. As he pointed out, Labour promised, in its 1997 manifesto, that police would be on the beat, but the average police constable today spends only 14 per cent. of their time on the beat and 21 per cent. of their time on paperwork-another Government failure.
	Several hon. Members spoke about issues of particular interest to them: the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) spoke about alcohol sales and my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) addressed drugs and their impact on people's lives. She referred to the failure of this Government in that area, and I have a very good drug rehabilitation centre in my constituency, Yeldall Manor, which is a long-term residential centre. It has an excellent record of getting people off drugs and turning their lives around, but because of the way in which the Government fund drug support, it is unable to fill all its beds. That is sad, because it could make a valuable contribution to people's lives.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) spoke thoughtfully about prison reform. The hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) raised the important issue of the Government's proposals to pay for their national care service by scrapping disability benefits for pensioners. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak dismissed that claim as unwarranted, and the Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform has said that it was untrue. I can only assume that they, and any other Labour Member who says that it is untrue, have not read the Government's Green Paper on social care, because every option, apart from the option of people paying for social care themselves, is underpinned by some use of disability benefits. Furthermore, the Under-Secretary for Work and Pensions in the other place, Lord McKenzie of Luton has said:
	"My Lords, the Green Paper,  Shaping the Future of Care Together, proposed that one way to deal with the challenge of an ageing society may be to bring some disability benefits and the new care and support system together into a single system as a better way of providing support. At this stage, we do not want to rule out any options and so are considering all disability benefits."-[ Official Report, House of Lords, 13 October 2009; Vol. 713, c. 112.]
	The hon. Member for Glasgow, East raised the important point that disability benefits, such as attendance allowance and disability living allowance for the over-65s, give those who receive them the option of deciding how to use that money for the care that they want and that suits their needs. The Government are proposing to take that individual decision making away from pensioners and to say to them, "We won't let you decide what care you should have; we will tell you what care you will have, and it's going to be what the Government decide you should have." That would be a retrograde step.
	There were also some lighter moments in the debate. The hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), as well as appearing to do a complete U-turn on the Liberal Democrats' policy on the DNA database, expounded the wonderful new policy of a regional points-based system for work permits. He said that that would work in the UK because it works in Australia. He needs to go and take some geography lessons if he thinks that that is a valid point.
	We also had a characteristically forceful speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), who managed to cover crime, antisocial behaviour, prisons, immigration, political correctness and the Human Rights Act. I am not sure whether it was going from the sublime to the ridiculous or the other way round when he was followed by the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey), who proceeded to speak about wheel-clamping. I can tell her that I know about the problems of wheel-clamping from cases in my constituency.
	At the core of this debate lies the Government's failure to deliver on their promises over 12 years and their inability to develop the thinking needed to take the country forward. Nowhere is that more clear perhaps than in their failure to have a plan to tackle the debt crisis and a radical strategy to tackle the jobs crisis.
	Let us consider the Government's record on welfare reform. Having promised to be the party of welfare reform in 1997 and having asked the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) to "think the unthinkable", they abandoned real welfare reform for more than a decade. Even when David Freud-now sitting on our Benches in the other place, as the noble Lord Freud-produced his report on welfare reform, the Government pushed it to one side and did nothing, and only produced their limited proposals for reform after my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell published our green paper with radical ideas for welfare reform. Once again, therefore, the Government followed our lead, but once again failed to take the necessary steps to make the radical changes needed.
	Let us remind the House of the figures: unemployment is at nearly 2.5 million, and while the recession has had an impact, we must never forget that the country entered the recession with nearly 5 million on out-of-work benefits. Youth unemployment is at a record level; one in five young people is out of work; the cost of incapacity benefit is now higher than in 1997, when Labour came to power; in some communities in this country, more than half of working-age adults are out of work and dependent on benefits; and worklessness has cost about £350 billion in benefits over the past 12 years. That is the cost of the Government's failure to reform welfare.
	One of the saddest and most damning indictments of the Labour Government is their failure to do anything about the large number of long-term unemployed people on incapacity benefit. Of course, some on IB are unable to work, and they should be supported, but many who claim it can, and want to, work. They need the individualised support that will help them to overcome barriers to work and get them into jobs. Our work programme-

Yvette Cooper: I welcome the hon. Gentleman's recommitment to freedom of movement within the United Kingdom, because at a certain point in his remarks earlier he seemed to be committing himself to adding regional points for different regional skills shortages to the draft immigration Bill.
	The hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) made a thoughtful speech on prison reform, while my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) and the hon. Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) both raised issues around wheel-clamping, which I know we will have an opportunity to debate further.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) pointed out many of the disingenuous ways in which Opposition Members have used statistics to support their image of a broken Britain, which their policies would, in fact, break further.
	The hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies) shouted at us all with great enthusiasm. He said that he did not believe the British Crime Survey and he refused to accept it. He said that he preferred hospital statistics instead. If he wants to refer to hospital statistics, I should point out to him that they, too, show a 6 per cent. decrease between 2007 and 2008 in admissions for assault with a sharp object. I hope that he will accept that that shows crime is falling, even if he does not want to accept the British Crime Survey.
	The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) gave us his account of the broken Britain that he sees all around him. What we did not see from him, as my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary pointed out, was any more information on his new plans for official forms. In  The Sunday Times he said:
	"Marriage has almost disappeared from official documents. I think that should change."
	We would have liked to hear more from him on that, because it would be interesting to know whether, under a Conservative Government, people will not be able to get a driving licence unless they have told the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency whether they are married; or whether they will not be able to submit a planning application to extend their house, until they have told the council whether they have walked down the aisle; or whether people will not be able to get a library card until they have told the librarian whether their husband has gone off with someone else.  [Interruption.] Conservative Members are saying, "How silly, how ridiculous," and I agree, but it was their honourable Front-Bench spokesperson who proposed this and it was their honourable Front-Bench spokesperson who, coming from a party that pretends to care and to complain about big government, put forward instead proposals that sound rather more like Big Brother.
	Let me tell the hon. Gentleman that there is a serious point here. If he is suggesting that children applying to schools should now have to put on their application forms information about whether or not their parents are married, I do not think that it is a good idea-and I do not think it is a good idea for the children, either. I am married, and I think it is great for people to be married, as strong relationships are important for children, but strong families come in all shapes and sizes. Unlike the Conservative party, I do not believe that a child should be told that his family is second-class because it does not have a married couple at the heart of it. In the end, that is at the core of the hon. Gentleman's statements about marriage and the Conservative party's proposals to put forward tax breaks for marriage and support for marriage in the benefit system at the expense of widows or at the expense of mums left literally holding the baby when their ex-husband walks off. I believe that it is children whom we should support. That is what our proposals in the Queen's Speech and the Child Poverty Bill are all about.
	The Queen's Speech supports children, as the Child Poverty Bill sets in place the historic ambition to cut child poverty and end it by 2020. We have already lifted 500,000 out of relative poverty, with a further 500,000 due to be lifted out of it by the measures we have brought in this year and last year.
	Helping people back to work is another important element. Families across Britain are being hit by the recession. The world financial crisis has caused the biggest shock to our economy for very many generations, but despite the recession and despite the big increase in the number of full-time students, the proportion of working-age households where no one works has, in fact, fallen since 1997. The proportion of households of working age with no one in work is, I repeat, still lower than it was in 1997 as a result of what the Conservatives had done before that year. That contrasts with what we have done to help people back into work, to help lone parents back into work even while unemployment is rising and to help people on long-term sickness benefits get the support and treatment they need.
	We want to do more to help young people because we know that they are most heavily affected during a recession. That is why, last week, the Prime Minister set out additional support to help young people from the moment they enter the jobcentre, and from the moment they become unemployed.
	The action that we have taken has already made a significant difference. Unemployment is currently about 400,000 lower than independent forecasters expected at the time of the Budget, saving us billions of pounds. That is partly the result of our extra support for the economy, and partly the result of the £5 billion extra help for the unemployed-£2.1 billion this year, and £2.9 billion next year-to get them back into work. That is £5 billion that Conservative Members have repeatedly refused to support.
	I will give the Opposition another opportunity tonight to say whether they will support that additional investment in jobcentres, and in getting young people back into work. Time and again, we have asked them to support that £5 billion, and time and again they have refused. I first asked the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) in April last year, and she refused to support the extra investment to help people into work. I asked her again in May, June, July and September. I even tried asking the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) in October, and he also refused to support it.
	Time and again, the Conservatives have refused to back the extra £5 billion that we need to help people to get back into work. That is discretionary spending-not automatic stabilisers, and not funded by cuts in departmental spending elsewhere. It is part of the temporary discretionary spending that the Conservative party has opposed. It is borrowing to support the economy, and it is helping to reduce unemployment. Unemployment is now 400,000 lower than forecast at the time of the Budget last year. As a result of our investment, unemployment is lower than expected, and lower than in previous recessions, but the Conservative party opposes it.
	The former Monetary Policy Committee member, Professor Danny Blanchflower, has said that if we followed the Conservative party's policies and cut investment in the middle of recession, we would potentially have unemployment of 4 million or 5 million now. That would be devastating for families and individuals across the country. The £5 billion investment is putting more staff into jobcentres to help people who are losing their jobs. In the 1980s, the Conservatives refused to put extra staff into jobcentres, and as a result made it voluntary to sign on and even to go into jobcentres to look for work. Little wonder that unemployment, and long-term unemployment, soared.
	Once again the Conservatives refuse to support the extra investment that is turning things around and helping young people who would not otherwise have got into jobs. Most shockingly of all, the Conservatives want to abolish the future jobs fund. They do not want to help people across the country-100,000 young people, and 50,000 of the long-term unemployed-back into work. We know why: they oppose big government. That was the statement from the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) earlier this month:
	"Human kindness, generosity and imagination are steadily being squeezed out by the work of the state."
	That is an astonishing statement. Is that what those on the Opposition Front Bench really think? Do they really think that help for mums in Sure Start is killing kindness? Do they think that faster treatment through the NHS is undermining generosity? Do they think that free entry to museums is somehow crippling kids' imagination?  [Interruption.] That is what he said-that human kindness, generosity and imagination are steadily being squeezed out by the work of the state.
	The Conservatives want the state to withdraw, to force people to sink or swim, and to leave charities to pick up the pieces. The last time the Conservative party tried that was in the 1980s.